Abstract

"Preserving multicentennial climate variability in long
tree-ring records is critically important for reconstructing the
full range of temperature variability over the past 1000 years.
This allows the putative 'Medieval Warm Period' (MWP) to be
described and to be compared with 20th-century warming in modeling
and attribution studies. We demonstrate that carefully selected
tree-ring chronologies from 14 sites in the Northern Hemisphere
(NH) extratropics can preserve such coherent large-scale,
multicentennial temperature trends if proper methods of analysis
are used. In addition, we show that the average of these
chronologies supports the large-scale occurrence of the MWP over
the NH extratropics."